We are pleased to announce that the Tokyo Lectures in Language Evolution will be held from the 2nd - 5th of April 2015 at the Komaba II Campus of the University of Tokyo. The event will bring together researchers from around the world to give an intensive series of courses and lectures introducing modern approaches to research on the origins and evolution of language.

Invited Speakers:

Cedric Boeckx (ICREA/Universitat de Barcelona)Bart de Boer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)Tecumseh Fitch (The University of Vienna)Jim Hurford (The University of Edinburgh)Simon Kirby (The University of Edinburgh)Koji Fujita (Kyoto University)Takashi Hashimoto (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)Yoshiki Nishimura (The University of Tokyo)Kazuo Okanoya (The University of Tokyo)Hirokazu Takahashi (The University of Tokyo)

The Protolang conference series creates an interdisciplinary platform for scholarly discussion on the origins of symbolic communication distinctive of human beings. The thematic focus of Protolang is on delineating the genetic, anatomical, neuro-cognitive, socio-cultural, semiotic, symbolic and ecological requirements for evolving (proto)language. Sign use, tools, cooperative breeding, pointing, vocalisation, intersubjectivity, bodily mimesis, planning and navigation are among many examples of such possible factors through which hominins have gained a degree of specificity that is not found in other forms of animal communication and cognition. We aim at identifying the proximate and ultimate causes as well as the mechanisms by which these requirements evolved; evaluating the methodologies, research tools and simulation techniques; and enabling extended and vigorous exchange of ideas across disciplinary borders.We invite scholars from A(rcheology) to Z(oology), and all disciplines in between, to contribute data, experimental and theoretical research, and look forward to welcoming you at one of our conferences!

Submissions should be suitable for 30 minutes presentation (20 min for presentation and 10 min for discussion).

Symposia:

Please submit a proposal including: (a) Title of the symposium, (b) name and affiliation of the organizers, (c) a general description of the symposium (400 words), (d) abstract of each contributed talk (100-150 words)

Submissions should be suitable for a two-hour session and include 3 to 5 presentations.The organizers are responsible for submitting the full symposium program to the EasyChair website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=protolang4. Theorganizers will also act as chairs of their session.Note: abstracts of talks, posters and symposia must be submitted in .doc (or .docx) format, no other format will be accepted.

The conference is organized by the International Network in Biolinguistics and NeTS Center at IUSS Pavia, Italy.

The conference will be held on January 26 and 27 and will be followed on the 28 by a dedicated session to NeTS results and work in progress. The conference will be transmitted via satellite.

This conference aims to contribute to our understanding of the human capacity for language, understood as a generative procedure that relates sounds and meanings via syntax. While theoretical hypotheses about this relation are part of the generative enterprise since its beginnings, recent developments address the issue in terms of the properties of the 'language organ'. Different hypotheses about the properties of the generative procedure, giving rise to the discrete infinity of language, are under discussion, and their connection with biology is open to important cross-disciplinary work. Advances have been made in human-animal studies to differentiate human language from animal communication. Contributions from neurosciences also point to the exclusive properties of the human brain for language. Studies in genetically based language impairments also contribute to the understanding of the properties of the language organ.

Invited speaker: Ken Wexler, MIT

Call for Papers:

We invite contributions presenting theoretical and experimental investigations on the properties of the Language Faculty relating language to its biological basis.

Abstracts should not exceed two pages, including data, references and diagrams. Abstracts should be typed in at least 11-point font, with one-inch margins (letter-size; 8'' 1/2 by 11'' or A4) and a maximum of 50 lines of text per page. Abstracts must be anonymous and submissions are limited to 2 per author, at least one of which is co-authored.

Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Please submit your abstract using the EasyAbs link that will be posted on the LinguistList by October 31.

The origin of language is a fascinating subject that has since always been generating great interest as well as important controversies. The interest depends on the core idea that language constitutes the element that, more than any other, makes us humans. The controversies depend on the methodological difficulties related to investigating this topic. Because of these difficulties, the Linguistics Society of Paris in 1866 banned any kind of debate among its members about the topic to avoid the disputes originating from fragile speculations. Over the time the situation has considerably changed, and the origin of language is no longer a taboo today. The emergence of Darwinian evolutionary theory has allowed to address this topic scientifically and systematically; and, in the last forty years, a growing number of scholars from many backgrounds has dealt with the problem and highlighted the different aspects involved in the genesis and evolution of human linguistic capacities.This special issue aims to address the question concerning the relationship between language origins and human nature. A large part of contemporary theoretical investigation attributes the “uniqueness” that characterizes our species to the fact that humans are talking animals. How true is this interpretation? Can we really assert that humans are uniquely characterized by their verbal skills? Do humans have a special status in nature because of language? The analysis of language in evolutionary terms is a powerful tool to answer these questions: considering our verbal skills in the framework of the evolutionary theory is indeed a way to understand how it is possible to investigate human beings in a naturalistic perspective. In other words, the theme of language origins gives us the opportunity to test Darwin’s idea of human beings as animals among other animals.

The issue aims to reflect the inherently interdisciplinary nature of research into the origin and the evolution of language. We invite papers from a wide range of subjects, including:

Articles should be submitted in blind review format (in Microsoft Word). Please omit any self-identifying information within the abstract and body of the paper.

Furthermore, we invite to submit reviews of recent books (published after 2010), and commentaries of articles and books (also published before 2010) that could be particularly interesting for the topics analyzed in this issue.

The University of Edinburgh is advertising for a long-term research-focussed job in any area of Language Evolution, which has the prospect after 5 years of converting into a permanent position. Edinburgh is famous for its involvement in language evolution research, based around what is probably the largest research group dedicated to the topic in the world. We're hoping to develop our research even further with this new appointment. You can find out more details here:

We are pleased to invite you to the Workshop on Language, Cognition and Computational Models, which will be held in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) and at the Institut des Systèmes Complexes de Paris, on May 28 and 29, 2013.

The goal of this event is to provide a venue for the multidisciplinary discussion of theoretical and practical research for computational models of language and cognition. The event centers around recent advances on computational models for language acquisition, processing and evolution.

The first day will mainly address language evolution and some of the computational models that have been proposed to investigate possible avenues for this phenomenon. The second day will address more varied issues, ranging from the origins of language to recent trends in machine translation. All the talks will address key questions dealing with cognitive, formal and/or computational issues related to language evolution and/or language processing.

The event is open to students, researchers and anyone interested in related topics. Attendance is free but people who plan to attend are kindly requested to register preferably before May 10th to help with the planning of the event. The registration form is available at:

The workshop is funded by the cluster of labs (labex) Transfers. It is organized thanks to the support of Lattice, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris Sciences et Lettres, the Institut des Systèmes Complexes de Paris-Ile de France, the Institute of Informatics of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil).

We thought this would be of particular interest to Language Evolution people. The University of Edinburgh has announced 100 new posts across all areas, including those that relate to work carried out in the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, which obviously includes topics relating to Language Evolution. These prestigious new positions will initially be mainly research-focussed initially, giving an unprecedented opportunity for candidates to pursue an active research agenda. It's expected that successful candidates will have a strong research record in the form of publications already.

The deadline is very tight, unfortunately - 18th April - so interested candidates should apply immediately.

The Evolutionary Linguistics Association (ELA) is proud to announce its second summer school in Cortona on Music and the Origins of Language. The school is intended for postdocs, lecturers and predocs with a background in computer science and a strong interest in music and the origins of language.

The summer school will be held in Cortona, Italy from Sunday 15 September to Friday 20 September 2013. Lectures, activities and meals are all collocated in Hotel Oasi and the Palazzone di Cortona. Participants will all stay at Hotel Oasi.

The summer school has a wide-ranging program of background lectures introducing concepts from biology, anthropology, psychology, music theory and linguistics that are helpful to understand the nature of creativity, the role and intimate relations between language and music, and the mechanisms underlying cultural evolution. It further contains technical lectures on the fundamental computational components required for language processing as well as technical ateliers to learn how to set up evolutionary linguistics experiments. Participants have the opportunity to present their latest research in a poster session. Embedded in the school is an ERC workshop of the Flow Machines project on musical style and composition. The school also features artistic ateliers in which participants create new creative works and engage in performance.

Interested researchers can apply by following the registration information that is available on the website. There are a limited number of scholarships available that cover participation and accommodation fees.

It receives support from FP7 PRAISE and INSIGHT projects, the euCognition Network of Excellence and the ESF project DRUST.

Just a heads up on an upcoming event. They aren't holding an open call for papers, but are asking for "expressions of interest" from researchers AT Cambridge.

Cambridge Language Sciences is hosting a major conference, Language Sciences in the 21st century: The interdisciplinary challenge, at West Road on 3-4 October 2013. The aim is to bring together an international group of researchers, whose work crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries, in order to explore key issues in language sciences. We hope the conference will be both a venue for the presentation of important new work and also a platform for Cambridge's growing profile in this area.The conference will include invited speakers, symposia, presented papers and posters. The four thematic strands will be:Philosophy of language meets computational linguisticsDiversity and universalsBeyond our primate inheritance: Neurobiological and evolutionary approaches to languageInterdisciplinary perspectives on multilingualismThe first step in putting together the programme will be to gain an idea of the range of contributions which could come from Cambridge, how they may fit within the conference strands, and how they represent the emergence of broader approaches and themes. We are not, at present, inviting submitted papers. Expressions of interest based on cooperative or collaborative research are particularly welcome.If you are a Cambridge researcher interested in the possibility of presenting your work at the conference, please contact Jane Walsh in the first instance by the end of January 2013 (jaw75@cam.ac.uk) indicating which theme or themes you feel your research might relate to, providing a brief description of your work and also an indication of how it meets the "interdisciplinary challenge".